


Once More

by WhisperingOrchard



Category: RWBY
Genre: Bittersweet, Crack Relationships, M/M, but mostly bitter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-19
Updated: 2014-09-19
Packaged: 2018-02-17 23:32:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2327174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhisperingOrchard/pseuds/WhisperingOrchard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As time batters their bodies to mounds of flesh and dust, so does it eat away at Ren's mind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once More

**Author's Note:**

> Based loosely on [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qtqmaIag-8) video.

Neptune has always harbored a deep love for Ren’s dancing.

Be it the steady sway of his hips, the quick cuts and smooth shimmies, the concentrated flicker that set his striking eyes ablaze, there is something far from mental comprehension—far from _natural_ , even—about the way Ren’s body moves.  Why, it was Ren’s sense of unparalleled rhythm that first caught his eye all those years ago—oh, how _stupid_ he had been, Neptune thinks with a goofy grin budding on his lips—falling head over heels for the boy stealing the dancefloor with his team. It was love at first sight, and as cheesy and clichéd and generally _dorky_ as it sounds, he can’t imagine where he might be today if not for that fateful night.

(Not that he’d had the gall to actually ask Ren out or anything that night—b-but it’s not like it took him two _strenuous_ , _slow-as-balls_ years or anything! He did _not_ take every waking opportunity to visit Vale with Sun and he _most certainly_ did _not_ accidentally run into Ren a few too many times for it to be considered subtle. And above all else, he didn’t find out that Ren had known about his little crush since his first visit after the Vytal Festival. Ren did _not_ reciprocate the feeling or find it at all oddly charming, Neptune did _not_ ask Ren out the next day, and if you think that they eventually chose to share their love and their lives with one another up to the present day, then you have another thing coming).

“… Neptune?”

Ren’s voice ushers Neptune back to reality, snapping his reverie almost instantly as his companion’s voice wafts softly towards his ears. Scratching absently at the creased skin beneath his goggles, Neptune peers across the room with a curious black eyebrow rising at the sound of his name. “Yeah?”

“Where am I…?”

At the sudden inquiry, Neptune’s expression softens—his thick untrimmed brows loosen and his jaw slackens as his arms unfold from across his chest. “You’re in your house. In _our_ house.” The oceans churning in his eyes divert and cast themselves far, far from Ren’s face. He cannot meet the other’s gaze.

Ren’s response is at once both astute and monotone. It echoes thickly, hauntingly, through the heavy air lingering around their bodies.  “Our house.”

“Yyyyyep,” he answers, adding an out-of-place emphasis on the “y”. “The one we’ve been living in for… what… ten years now? Something like that.” A little half-shrug racks his shoulders as he steps forward, eyeing Ren’s lips, his collarbone, his hands, as far from those dismal, distressed, _dazzling_ eyes of his as possible. Bearing a wide, forced smirk, Neptune reaches forward and grabs Ren’s hands in his own, ensnaring the other’s fingers and knotting them together. “Hey, wanna dance?”

Without awaiting a proper response, he side-steps and gently tugs at Ren’s hands, wordlessly insisting his cooperation; Ren complies and proceeds to systematically place his feet in time with his partner’s.  One-step, two-step, three—here and there, flitting across the stone floor of the living space with feet light as air itself; Neptune, while still a bit clumsy and erratic, makes an effort to avoid stepping on his lover’s toes at all costs.

And yet, despite his ordinary aversions to the _unnatural_ and _repulsive_ art of dance (with the exception of Ren’s, of course), Neptune feels a stronger elation now than he has in months—a peculiar welling of wonderment, of utter _bliss_ , with the warm sensation of Ren’s clammy fingers awkwardly melding to his own in the summer heat that permeates through the invisible orifices of the building. A little laugh flutters out past his lips in little wisps, rebounding off of Ren’s forehead and lightly rustling his feathery bangs. Gently, he twirls around and holds Ren nearer his body, flush up against his chest, and it _happens_ —

One second in weighted silence.

Two.

Then three.

Then four, fractured only by weary, breathless gasps.

Neptune’s eyes meet Ren’s at last, bulbous jellyfish slicing through murky gunmetal water—merciless, unforgiving, guarded, and above all else _afraid_. An indiscernible confusion swells and lurches in the shorter man’s glance, and without so much as another utterance for his beloved, he turns and staggers back to the quilt-covered sofa in the corner of the room.

It is with quivering fingers and a tremulous lip that Neptune tails him to the couch, drapes the quilt across his body, and presses a gentle kiss to his forehead.

Ren remembers naught, and there is naught that Neptune can do.


End file.
